by Chris Bauer
Whirrr (cough)…
Whirrr, whirrr (cough)…
Still airborne it coasted toward his skiff, moving west but way too low, staying parallel to the surf. It reached the beach before the engine gave out, the plane gliding above the island’s scrub flora lining the dust field behind the sand. It skipped across the treetops, severing one wing, which spun the plane in circles until it crash-landed on its belly tail-first in a clearing.
Tom didn’t know much about airplanes, didn’t know much about anything that went on around the rest of the islands in real time, or elsewhere, but he did know what this aircraft was: a Japanese Zero that had sputtered so close to his head he could have reached up and rubbed its emblem. He rowed ashore and hoofed his way through the break in the tree line, into the clearing.
Three-quarters of the aircraft sat intact and horizontal on its fuselage, one wing missing, smoke rising from underneath, the severed landing gear somewhere in the trees.
Tom picked up a large rock, tucked it into the crook of his arm, and climbed onto the wing. He lumbered up to the glass-enclosed cockpit, got eye-level with the unconscious pilot. The pilot’s head was slumped forward, visible in the smoke-filled cabin.
Tom muscled the rock overhead in both hands.
He brought it down hard, as hard as he did on spider crab shells. Crunch. The first blow sent spindly cracks across the cockpit glass that blurred his view of the pilot, but it didn’t breach the plane’s interior. The second and third blows did, cracking open the compromised glass, the pilot fully visible again and now within arm’s reach—a Japanese man in goggles, leather helmet, jacket, gloves, and a white aviator scarf turning crimson around his neck.
Tom reached in, grabbed the pilot’s handgun loose in his lap, and tossed it out of the cockpit, where it landed in the scrub grass. Smoke now wafted from the interior, was met with smoke rising from under the fuselage. Blood trailed down the pilot’s face from his scalp to meet the blood coming from his nose and mouth, the pilot still slumped while Tom punched out more of the cockpit glass with his bare hands, had to hurry, the smoke getting thicker inside and out. He unclasped the unconscious man’s harness and fit his arms under his shoulders. He lifted and dragged, and a few grunts later Tom lay on the wing, the bleeding pilot draped across his lap. He lowered him to the ground and hopped down. Flames flared from beneath the fuselage, rose quickly into the cockpit, lighting it up like a bonfire. Tom dragged the man across sand and dirt, out of harm’s way, and propped him against a tree while some of the plane’s aluminum skin ignited. The rest of the plane went up like gasoline-drenched charcoal in a fire pit, the lone remaining wing left intact.
Out of breath and seated next to his new charge, Tom watched the fire. The pilot’s eyes opened behind his goggles, the dancing flames reflecting off the lenses, terror overtaking him, his shrieking protests in Japanese. He groped at a breast pocket in his aviator jacket, his hand not behaving, him unable to unbutton it. Tom did it for him, the pilot protesting, a weak attempt at resistance until the battered man drifted into unconsciousness again. Tom lifted out the pocket’s contents, some yellow papers. He unfolded them.
The markings were in Japanese, unreadable to him, but there were maps. Drawings of Miakamii, the rest of the Hawaiian Islands, and the other Leeward Islands leading west from Kauai. Small depictions of numerous U.S. warships docked in what Tom knew as Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu.
These were the pilot’s orders. They detailed his mission, in Japanese and pictorially.
Goodness… he was returning from a bombing run…
Tom’s wife entered the clearing, called then ran to him.
“No, stay back, Lani,” he shouted in Miakamiian. “This man may be dangerous. His gun is over there. Bring it to me, then go back into the village. Find someone who can speak Japanese. And we need a stretcher. For now he will be our prisoner. We need to find out what happened to the places marked on these maps.” But he already had a pretty good idea what that was.
Lani did as told. Tom removed the pilot’s leather helmet, unzipped his flight jacket, and aimed the gun at the sleeping man’s head while he waited for him to regain consciousness.
Help arrived by way of their islander friends and someone who could read and speak a little Japanese. What would come to be known as The Miakamii Siege, an event that terrorized Miakamii’s small native population, began when a Japanese sympathizer on the island liberated their prisoner. Tom and Lani Imakila ended it with a late-night ambush, Tom hurling the pilot into a stone wall after taking three slugs from the pilot’s gun, to the groin, the stomach, and the upper leg. Lani pounced, bashing the pilot’s head with a rock. A wounded Tom finished the pilot off by slashing his throat.
Two suicides followed, both islanders of Japanese descent who had provided the pilot hospice. The pilot’s body was dumped into the channel. The islanders cannibalized the rest of the plane, spiriting away anything usable, including one aerial machine gun and its ammunition taken from a wing unaffected by the fire. When the U.S. Navy finally came to investigate, there was little left of the wreck to recover.
Internment camps opened in the islands and on the U.S. mainland shortly thereafter.
“Any chance someone was trying to get at you with this hit, Evan?”
Evan’s stern gaze met Philo’s similar countenance. “No. Hell, I don’t know. I don’t think so.” He shook his head, but Philo could tell he believed himself a little less as each second passed until he returned to the same resolve. “Better fucking not be that. No.”
On the closest Miakamiian mountain ridge, the U.S. Navy’s fully functioning unmanned radar early-warning system went through its paces 24/7, watching the skies, maintaining an all’s-clear signal. And if it ever wasn’t all clear, the installation was there to send a different message, whereby the U.S. could open its war gates of hell in response. The system was CO Evan Malcolm’s responsibility as part of the Kauai military outpost until the end of this year, when he was due to retire. North Korea, China, Russia all seemed less friendly toward the U.S. day after day. The closest physical threat to Hawaii—Japan—was now a U.S. friend, although some second- and third-generation Hawaiians would forever remain skeptical.
Patrick exited the hallway fresh from his assessment of the bedroom, spoke to Philo.
“Need a deep clean under the floor beneath the bed, sir, might even need to replace the plywood and the underlayment, maybe a blast of enzymes in the crawl space below it, too. I can get into it and take a look, sir.”
“Thanks, Patrick. Evan, we’ll look into who carries environmental cleaning supplies in the neighborhood, make some calls, scour the internet. Okay with you?”
A weak nod from Evan.
“And Philo sir?”
“What?”
Patrick held out a small, cloudy plastic drinking cup. “From the bathroom, sir. See, ah, I found this there—”
Philo and Evan looked inside the cup. “What are we looking at, Patrick? A big mothball?”
“Um, no, sir,” Patrick said. “Dry ice.”
A low fog surrounded the white-gray dry ice chunk, making the bottom of the cup look eerie. Too big for a mothball, Philo knew now, his nose in the cup. Didn’t smell like a mothball either. Didn’t smell at all. Extremely cold. A hallmark of dry ice, the solid version of carbon dioxide, was no smell. Frozen water had a smell; frozen CO2 did not.
“Why didn’t it melt?” Evan asked.
“Dry ice doesn’t melt, it sublimates,” Philo said. “Transitions from solid to a gas, no liquid form in between. Might take more than twenty-four hours to fully sublimate, depending on how large the piece or pieces were, and if there was any insulation. Any reason Miya would have dry ice in her bathtub, Evan?”
“No idea.”
“The bathroom, sir,” Patrick interjected, “it’s a mess. Something happened in the bathroom.”
They reentered the bedroom, marched to the master bath, to a door that wasn’t open during their first pas
s through the bedroom. “You open this door, Patrick?” Philo asked.
“Yes, sir.”
White porcelain slipper tub, standalone shower stall, toilet, a counter with two elevated basin sinks, fishhook spigots that leaned over them, his and hers mirrors above it all. Pastel blue-green walls, white wainscoting halfway up. The tile floor, also white, had black shoe scuff marks between the tub and the door. The three of them stepped inside, the bathroom spacious. They were immediately drawn to the tub, red stains draping the inside of the porcelain. Soon after hovering over the tub, their interest went to the window, the lower frame closed but empty, the glass gone.
Philo checked the frame for jagged glass, found none. He poked his head outside, surveyed the jungle-like overgrowth that started fifteen feet or so from the house, beyond where the green grass ended. Directly below the window, on the grass, the glass shards sparkled.
“Broken from the inside out,” Philo said.
But inside, the floor tile crunched under their feet. “Then what’s this?” Evan said, lifting his boot.
On the white tile where they stood, a splotch of yellow, the tile it covered feeling gritty underfoot. Philo got down on one knee, stuck a finger into the dried stain, rubbed it, raised it to his nose. “Urine. It crystalized.”
“Betsy was in here,” Evan said. “Her dog.”
“Sirs?” Patrick redirected them to the tub, to the blood stains there. “See—more dry ice chunks.” A haze surrounded two more pieces of dry ice the size of baseballs sitting on the tub’s drain.
“Almost melted,” Evan said.
“Like I said, it sublimates directly to a gas. CO2. The tub is tilted so water drains out of it,” Philo said. “The dry ice slid toward the drain because of the tilt, not because it was melting.”
Philo crinkled his nose and leaned sideways, now looking for the origin of another smell. He checked out the space between the freestanding slipper tub and the back wall.
A large, single, tootsie-rolled dog turd lay there, hardened. “It seems Betsy left another gift.”
Evan said it first. “They locked her dog in here with her.”
Philo closed the bathroom door so they could get a look at the back of it. It was scuffed with nail marks and bite marks, and chunks of the white wood were ripped out.
“Probably locked the dog in here first,” Philo said, pivoting for another look at the window, “but the dog wanted out.”
“Wanted to protect Miya,” Evan said.
Philo couldn’t stop himself from a reflexive glance in the tub’s direction. Chances were at some point it was more like Betsy was protecting Miya’s dead body. “Yes,” he said, “before and after.”
The toilet seat, next to a hamper, next to a vanity, next to the window, was the path the dog took. “Then Betsy went through the window, the only way out.”
“The cops,” Evan said, incredulous, “why didn’t they mention any of this to me?”
“I don’t know. Still working the case, not in a sharing mood maybe. Let’s have a look outside for the dog.”
Behind the house Evan called for her, getting no response other than a heightened cacophony of birds, insects, and animals. The three of them fanned out, wandered ten yards or so into the jungle, wild Hawaiian flora reaching at them as they walked. Philo pulled up, stopped calling for the dog, shouted to Evan.
“Any water nearby? Rivers, lakes, a pond maybe?”
Evan answered, kept walking. “Yes. A pond, another twenty yards. Why?”
“Evan, I didn’t mention this back there, but—”
“Philo sir.” Patrick’s voice came to them from up ahead, slightly right. “Over here, sir.”
Philo and Evan swept away eye-level tree branches as they trudged through the thick, frondy vegetation brushing their legs and ankles, soon converging on Patrick. Buzzing flies feasted on something at ground level in front of him. Evan got into a crouch.
“Sweet Jesus. Betsy sweetie…”
He swiped at the flies on Betsy’s cold nose and those hovering near it, blood caked on the dog’s forehead, but the mark was only slight, not more than a scratch, certainly not a mortal wound. “What happened to you, Betsy…”
Philo laid his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Evan. Evan…”
Evan, now distressed: “What, damn it?”
“I’m surprised she made it this far, bud. She wasn’t attacked, Evan; they left Betsy in that bathroom, in there with the dry ice and Miya. The sublimation… it was suffocating her. CO2’s heavier than oxygen, will stay near the floor until it builds up. My guess is this is why she left her dead mistress’s side and bolted through the window. Lightheaded, woozy, she was trying to stay conscious, maybe looking for water…”
Evan raised his head, faced forward, Philo and Patrick doing likewise. The pond was less than thirty feet ahead of them. Evan finally lost his shit, his sobs turning malevolent as he bellowed at the insects gathered on the corpse, swatting at them, brushing them off, stomping them into the dirt, no other wounds visible on the dog and yet there she lay. He now pulled at her body, started dragging it toward the pond—
“I gotta give her a chance…”
“Evan. No. Evan, c’mon now, bud…” Philo crouched, put his arm around his friend.
Evan pulled back, dropped ass-first onto the forest floor, buried his head in his hands, his shoulders rising and falling in waves. He suddenly calmed himself, like he’d been stiff-armed to his face.
“Why… the fuck… was there dry ice in that tub?”
When Philo didn’t answer right way, Evan tilted his head, analyzing the hesitation: “What is it? Tell me, damn it!”
Philo and Patrick shared glances. It would be Philo’s place to spell it out, as a crime scene cleaning pro, but more so as Evan’s close friend.
“Chances are they brought it for the organs. For transport.”
7
Incognito on Tahiti, the status of one Kaipo Mawpaw. A status presently undergoing interruption in French Polynesia, the South Pacific island collective.
She needed to leave Tahiti behind for a bit after hearing the drumbeats from the north. More like word-of-mouth omens, drifting twenty-four-hundred miles south on the warm sea winds that occasionally brought a few of her home-island’s former inhabitants to her newly adopted residential paradise. The message: trouble from the U.S. mainland had breached Kauai and was about to spread.
She boarded a plane in Papeete, the collective’s capital, on Tahiti-Nui, the bigger portion of the island. Her new home was Iti in the southeast, connected by an isthmus. Smaller, less developed, much less populated, it was the sharpest of contrasts to the U.S. mainland, the violent world she’d left behind. Tahiti was a place for her to rest, a place to hide, a place she could return to after she dealt with whatever the threat was up north. She’d cobbled together an itinerary, the first leg overland, the second in the air to Lihue Airport, Kauai, Hawaii.
“Now boarding rows eighteen through thirty-seven,” the agent said through the loudspeaker.
Her bag went into an overhead bin. She took her seat in Economy. Eight and a half hours in here. God help her and her leggy five-ten frame. Sunglasses, with a navy-colored baseball cap that covered her black cornrows: a new look for the native islander. New because it had to be.
Tahiti’s black sand beaches propped up its reputation as a paradise, with only a few roads, mostly dirt, between the populated areas. How much infrastructure did a person really need, had been her argument with herself. She had freedom, distance, and anonymity, which went a long way toward all but guaranteeing her safety, at least in the short run. But she had no livelihood. That’s why she spent four days a week on Bora Bora, another part of the French Polynesian islands and more of a tourist magnet. An expensive commute, but necessary. Bora Bora was where people with money congregated for their South Pacific vacations, to include customized services that were her wheelhouse: massages, personal training, and sometimes, as pleasing as she was to the eye, as
an escort.
Good reasons, all three, to get to know her, but she was no longer anybody’s piece of ass in this business. Too impractical—customers talked, and bad reputations could sink business—but the other reason was she refused to fuck anyone for money ever again. Staying ahead of her drug addictions meant she no longer had to.
She’d worked a deal with one of the Bora Bora hotels: they gave her space in a luxurious hut over the water, where she provided her wellness services to a wealthy clientele four days a week in exchange for providing personal training for the hotel execs on staff, all of it on the up and up. She had a steady stream of income to supplement what she brought with her from her former employment on the mainland. Her stash was substantial, and it allowed her to decline training and massage work whenever it didn’t feel right.
New to Bora Bora, and new to where she preferred to call home, Taharuu Beach on Tahiti, she lived quietly with a new identity: Aiata Hauata. Aiata, or “woman who eats clouds.” A Polynesian name she’d liked from past visits. For her it had additional, transcendent significance: eating clouds was drug parlance for smoking and eating opium, something Kaipo had been doing heavily not too long ago after her pill habit had accelerated. Which was before the Hawaiian crime family Ka Hui had taken an interest in her and her expertise: crime scene cleaning, the kind that made crimes look as if they’d never happened. The drug habit nearly cost her her life. Ka Hui fixed all that. But staying with the crime family would have relegated her to trophy status on the arm of one Wally Lanakai, which would have cost her her freedom and her identity as something other than Wally’s woman. She’d left Philadelphia to rid herself of Wally, which meant she had to become a ghost.
Hauata, her chosen surname, she’d picked from a list of Tahitian names on the internet; she had no idea what it meant. The fake passport and identity had cost her thousands. A cheap price to pay for independence, to not be owned by anybody.
